USA TODAY International Edition
WAR. FAMINE. DROUGHT.
More women say they won’t have children because of climate change
“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question – is it OK to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Though Laura Formisano says she never felt a huge desire to have children, she used to presume that would change.
But climate change could make the planet so uninhabitable, she says, she’s not sure she can ever bring herself to become a parent.
“It almost feels like a con, to bring a child into the world when it’s probably not going to be a place we’re really going to want to live,” says Formisano, 30, who manages a co-working space in Los Angeles and has been married for seven months.
Is the future simply too horrific to bring children into? Some couples, frightened by the prospect of droughts, wars, famines and extinctions brought on by climate
change, are making that decision.
A Facebook group for women to discuss the idea launched this month, and it’s winning supporters in Europe and the USA. Conceivable Future, a U.S.based group, has held more than 50 house parties in 16 states in recent years where women worried about global warming discuss forgoing motherhood.
“There are around 70 new signups in the last seven days,” says Blythe Pepino, who helped create the Facebook page #BirthStrike.
The reasons women come to that decision are many and varied, but they tend to focus on what they call a cleareyed view of the changes a warming planet are likely to bring.
For some, the consequences are all too easy to imagine.
Eight years ago, a tornado devastated Christy LeMaster’s hometown of Joplin, Missouri. The monster storm was 22 miles long and at times a mile wide. It killed 158 people, injured 1,150 and destroyed almost 7,000 homes. LeMaster’s family was OK, but she knows many people who weren’t.
“The reality is, they’re still rebuilding. Tornadoes on that scale are only supposed to happen every 50 or 60 years. When catastrophes on this scale start happening more often, what does life look like?” says LeMaster, 38, who lives in Chicago and curates public programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Though LeMaster says she’s not someone who has “a deep drive for child-bearing,” she’d long thought she would have kids. But as climate change stokes the prospect of serious economic dislocation and fights over resources, “I feel even more scared now,” she says.
“If I’m honest with myself, I don’t know what water will look like in 10 years, what temperatures will look like in 15, or even food distribution.”
Ocasio-Cortez asks the question
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., 29, who pushed for a Green New Deal to fight climate change, broached the topic last month on Instagram.
“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question – is it OK to still have children?” she says in a video streamed from her kitchen.
Newlywed Luci Kade of Atlanta says her friends don’t talk about climate change much, which she attributes to the shift “happening on a larger and slower scale than we can comprehend.” But the trends are clear to her, and she says she can’t ignore them.
“It’s really important to respond to the climate change crisis by actually treating it like a crisis . ... You don’t go on with business as usual,” says Kade, 28.
The forest fires, hurricanes and other catastrophic weather events in recent years give her pause about what kind of world humanity will live in 30 or 40 years from now.
Because of that, she and her wife decided to adopt. Kade works in the foster care system, so she knows how many children there need families. “It just feels morally and ethically irresponsible to have my own children,” she says.
There’s growing concern over the dangers climate change poses. People in 13 of 26 countries polled by the Pew Research Center last month said it is the top international threat.
Women more than men are worried. In the USA, 66 percent of women cited global climate change as a major threat to the nation; 51 percent of men did.
Last October, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that mankind has 12 years to act to avoid “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Even in the best scenarios, it said, the world will face more extreme weather – more wildfires, more droughts, more floods, rising sea levels and the loss of almost all coral reefs.
Whether that affects family planning isn’t known. The U.S. birthrate has been falling for years, and in 2017, it was 60.3 births per 1,000 women – the lowest fertility rate since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping records in 1909. Causes such as women marrying later, worries about the economy and the difficulty of finding affordable child care have all been suggested.
‘You’re on your own’
No one has polled American women to ask whether climate change is a part of their decision. In Australia, a survey of 6,500 women released last month found 22 percent of respondents in their 30s said they were considering having no more children, or not to have children at all, because of climate change.
“It would break my heart having this child that you love, that you nurture and raise, and then you’re leaving them behind with a ‘Well, good luck! Things aren’t going to get better, you’re on your own,’ ” Formisano says.
Her husband agrees, she says. “He always says, ‘We’re too many. We don’t need to have this many people on Earth.’ ”
In 2014, Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli met at a concert in New Hampshire. Both 30 at the time, they began talking about climate change and “within five minutes” came to the topic of not having children because of their worries about how bad things seemed likely to get, they say.
They had never found a place to share their fear. After talking most of the night, they decided they couldn’t be the only ones wrestling with such concerns. They launched house parties where people could talk about family planning and climate change.
Kallman, a professor of international development at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Ferorelli, a climate activist in Chicago, acknowledge that whatever happens, as two white women in the USA, they won’t find things as difficult as women elsewhere in the world. Even so, they’re consumed by “the knowledge that what we’re facing is so much worse than we imagine,” Kallman says.
Difficult decisions
Ryanne Hoogeboom, 38, attended one of the early events. She lives in Albuquerque with her 4-year-old daughter, Kit. Though she loves her daughter dearly, she and her partner decided not to have any more children. “He’s in the same camp I am,” she says.
When Hoogeboom explains to relatives why Kit doesn’t have any siblings, she gets confused looks if she mentions climate change.
“People don’t really understand what I’m so freaked out about. ‘It’s going to get figured out’ is their attitude,” she says.
To be sure, the decision to not have children isn’t a full-on movement; it’s more a discussion beginning to bubble up in people’s consciousness. Organizers are clear that it’s not about population control.
“It’s not like my choosing to have a kid or not is going to solve the climate crisis,” Kallman says.
The goal isn’t to get women and men to pledge not to have children but instead to provide a place to talk about a topic that most people don’t want to discuss.
“It’s not anybody’s answer to this question that matters, it’s the fact that people are even having to ask this question,” Ferorelli says. “That’s what’s messed up.”
“People don’t really understand what I’m so freaked out about. ‘It’s going to get figured out’ is their attitude.” Ryanne Hoogeboom